As we progress into the twenty-first century, communications systems continue to enhance the interconnectedness of mankind. In particular, mobile telephony permits individuals to stay in contact with each other, without the prior limitations of being tied to land line systems. With the simple act of dialing a telephone number, a cellular telephone user can contact anyone possessing a telephone for instant voice communication. As mobile telephony technology improves, engineers have developed additional means of communicating using a cell phone. These include various forms of short messaging and email.
Unfortunately, while voice communication across multiple plain old telephone systems (POTS) and varying cell phone technologies is possible due to compatibility of the systems, users of mobile telephony products have difficulty communicating with each other over different systems and standards. For instance, a cell phone user having access to short messaging service (SMS) messages can not send an SMS message to a user utilizing a Research-in-Motion (RIM) pager which operates using Mobitex messages. Things become even more difficult when those users are operating with different service providers.
A system is needed to provide mobile telephony product users access to differing messaging types, such that messages sent in a first format can be received by a user in a second format. Such a system should provide a message translation device to translate incoming messages into a common protocol that can be converted to a protocol compatible with a recipient device.